Details for January 13 presentations

Length: 10 minutes maximum, including Q&A
Format: See below for guidelines on the format
You will be graded on the content of your presentation and your presentation style.
You can use a powerpoint but it is not required. If you do not use a powerpoint and would like to write on the whiteboard, please do so. However, do not spend a lot of time writing or drawing. 

Format
Powerpoint presentation (optional): Slides don't need to be elaborate (fancy). Save time and keep them simple, but they must be in correct English with proper spelling and grammar. 4 slides are recommended. Consider them as "talking points" that guide your presentation for both you and the class:
Slide #1: title page
Slide #2: introduction and outline - tell us your topic and your research focus, what you did in your research and how you did it.
Slide #3: one or two important things you found out from the research
Slide #4: conclusion - what you learned from this research

Technical points for your slides if you decide to use Powerpoint:
1. suitable sized font - 24 point minimum?
2. keep text to a minimum - too much text on the slide is NG. Points or single words only (no full sentences). Max 3 or 4 lines?
3. check English - spelling and grammar - this is a MUST

Bottom line - it is very important to practise your presentation. Keep that in mind as January 13 approaches. Get in touch with Ms. MacGregor if you have any questions or would just like to confirm or check something. 

Unit 13: Communication (p. 111)

Of the many ways to communicate electronically, which ones do you use and what do you use them for and how often?

I would answer as follows:

Electronic media: 

• Email: work correspondence, communicating with friends and family - daily
• Internet: Google searches, newspaper articles, and online radio - daily: Kindle books - occasionally; Skype - rarely; Youtube for music and "how to" videos - frequently; to communicate with students - frequently
• Text: family - daily
• SNS: I have memberships to facebook and LinkedIn, but use only when necessary.
• TV: news, weather - daily; documentaries and movies - occasionally
• Radio: amusement, weather, and to know the time - daily
• Telephone: contact shops, contact workplace - frequently; friends - occasionally; family - frequently

Other media

• Postal letter: friends and family - occasionally; friends and acquaintances - seasonally
• Newspaper: daily

Sample search for topic information

I started out by Googling  this question: Are Japanese companies offshoring? It took me to a list of sites, among them was this article:

---

July 21, 2010

Many in Japan Are Outsourcing Themselves

By MIKI TANIKAWA

BANGKOK — In October 2008, when the world was reeling from the collapse of Lehman Brothers and job markets were freezing up everywhere, Akane Natori waltzed into a new position she liked. “Things went so smoothly after applying online, and before I knew it, I had the job,” said Ms. Natori, who was then a 26-year-old sales assistant at an import-export company in Tokyo.

There was just one catch, one that speaks volumes about the Japanese economy and the challenges younger Japanese face in a country where college graduates used to count on lifetime employment with the company they joined right out of school. Ms. Natori’s new job — working in a call center answering queries from customers in Japan — was in Bangkok.

Under fierce pressure to cut costs, large Japanese companies are increasingly outsourcing and sending white-collar operations to China and Southeast Asia, where doing business costs less than in Japan. But while many American companies have been content to transfer work to, say, an Indian outsourcing company staffed with English-speaking Indians, Japanese companies are taking a different tack. Japanese outsourcers are hiring Japanese workers to do the jobs overseas — and paying them considerably less than if they were working in Japan.

Japanese outsourcers like Transcosmos and Masterpiece have set up call centers, data-entry offices and technical support operations staffed by Japanese workers in cities like Bangkok, Beijing, Hong Kong and Taipei.

Such outposts cater to Japanese employers who say they cannot do without Japanese workers for reasons of language and culture. Even foreign citizens with a good command of the Japanese language, they say, may not be equipped with a sufficiently nuanced understanding of the manners and politesse that Japanese customers often demand.

“If you used Japanese-speaking Chinese, for example, the service quality does not match up with the expectations of the end customers,” said Tatsuhito Muramatsu, managing director at Ms. Natori’s employer, Transcosmos Thailand, a unit of Transcosmos, which is based in Tokyo.

Statistics on exactly how many Japanese have taken jobs outside the country at lower wages are hard to come by. But according to the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, there was a net outflow of 100,000 Japanese in the year that ended in September 2008, the most recent for which statistics were available. It was the highest number in the past 20 years.

While the number of workers sent overseas by Japanese companies on traditional expatriate packages fell 0.32 percent in the same period, the number of “independent businesspeople” and freelance contractors like Ms. Natori rose 5.69 percent, according to data from the Japanese Foreign Ministry. Many of those workers were headed to cities like Shanghai and Bangkok, where net increases of Japanese residents have been recorded in the past several years, according to the ministry.

Many large Asian cities — including Bangkok, Hong Kong, Jakarta, New Delhi, Shanghai and Singapore — have three to four Japanese job placement agencies each. Four Japanese outsourcing companies run call centers in Bangkok, which is a particularly attractive city for such operations because it has low costs but good amenities, offering a living standard that young Japanese enjoy.

Transcosmos runs the largest Japanese call center in Bangkok, having nearly tripled its staff from 60 workers in late 2008 to 170 now. “We see ourselves growing to as large as 500 workers here,” Mr. Muramatsu said.

Transcosmos pays a call center operator in Thailand a starting salary of about 30,000 baht, or $930, a month — less than half of the ¥220,000, or $2,500, the same employee would get in Tokyo. That means a saving of 30 percent to 40 percent for customers, Transcosmos said.

Masterpiece, another Japanese outsourcer, has operations in Bangkok, Beijing and Dalian, China. Its workers handle jobs like mail-order service requests, processing of time sheets and other salary paperwork, and following up on e-mail inquiries. The company has Japanese and Chinese employees, and according to its Web site it is hiring people to establish another call center, in the Philippines.

Japan lost 240,000 jobs in May, government statistics showed, bringing the seasonally adjusted number of people with work to a two-decade low. The unemployment rate rose to 5.2 percent. Although exports have picked up since the end of 2009, economic growth remains slow. Gross domestic product expanded 1.2 percent in the first three months of 2010 from the level in previous quarter.

“Overcapacity and excessive competition haunt domestic Japanese industries that are battling for a shrinking economic pie,” said Takumi Fujinami, senior economist at the Japan Research Institute, a research organization affiliated with Sumitomo Mitsui Bank. “That exerts perennial pressures to reduce costs. Japanese companies can’t cut off existing employees on the lifetime roster, so they are squeezing the younger workers ever more tightly.”

Some overseas Japanese workers, like Ms. Natori, are not unhappy with their jobs, despite the low salaries. They say their lives abroad have given them a new sense of liberty.

Ms. Natori, who was recently promoted from call operator to a supervisory position, said she saved more money in Thailand than she would in Japan.

“If you are willing to live off local Thai restaurants, you spend only 30 baht for rice with eggs, vegetables and meat,” she said. “My rent currently is only 6,000 baht, and utilities are at most an additional 500.” She lives in a roomy studio in a condominium in central Bangkok with security and a swimming pool that is open 24 hours. Life is better in Thailand, she said, because she is free from some of the social and workplace pressures that ate into her private life in Japan. “The moment you step outside, you are in a foreign country here,” she said. “That allows me to have separate workplace and private lives. I am actually able to concentrate on work better because of the clear separation.”

Ms. Natori said her parents and friends often visited her in Bangkok, so she did not miss Japan too much, nor did she have a definite timetable to return home.

Misuzu Yara, 34, realized in early 2008 that job opportunities in Japan, especially in her native Okinawa, far from the Japanese main island, were diminishing. So when an acquaintance at Tempstaff invited her to join the new division in Jakarta as a local hire, she agreed.

“The salary as a local hire in Indonesia wasn’t very different from what you’d get in Okinawa, actually,” she said. “Considering how important Asia is going to be for Japan, I figured it would be a good opportunity.”

Now, she helps find jobs for Japanese workers in Indonesia. Japanese companies in Indonesia generally offer Japanese local hires minimum take-home pay of $1,500 a month, plus a vehicle and sometimes housing.

“The number of inquiries grew markedly during 2008-2009 from young Japanese workers who had difficulty finding jobs in Japan,” she said.

But local hires do not have the same sense of job security as workers in Japan do, Ms. Yara said. “There is a sense that each and every moment at your job determines your chances of keeping it.”

While Transcosmos executives recognize that some Japanese have sought work in Thailand because they could not find employment at home, they say that the job performance of their Thai-based operators is superior to that of counterparts in Japan.

“It is possible that workers in Thailand are able to perform well because they have fewer things to worry about in life,” said Hiroyuki Uchimura, general manager of business process outsourcing services at Transcosmos in Tokyo.

With the Japanese population aging and shrinking and more Japanese companies seeking avenues of growth overseas, job opportunities for Japanese abroad are likely to grow, said Kazuyuki Ichikawa, chief operating officer of Pasona Global, which helps its clients find Japanese workers overseas.

While Japanese companies could save even more if they hired only locals overseas — some experts say locals could be hired at half the cost — the preference for Japanese nationals is likely to endure, Mr. Ichikawa said.

“You say one thing and Japanese employees will understand three things,” he said. “In Western cultures, you might be straightforward with what you want your staff to know, but a Japanese manager would want you to understand it without having to say it.”

Schedule till the end of the semester

The remaining classes are as follows:
December 2, 9, 16, January 13
Besides working in the textbook, there will be a final paper and presentation.

Schedule
December 2: 
Make pairs
Take up p. 63 Type 1 conditionals HW
Do p. 63 Speaking 2 #1, 3, 5 in pairs
Continue with pp. 64-65 - Career Skills, Listening 3, Speaking
Take up HW research about outsourcing assigned last week (see HP)
Introduction to final paper (due January 20 at 12 noon to my office, Chuo 715) and presentation (January 13 in class) - see HP for details about both.

December 9: 
Time for finalizing final paper topic
Begin Unit 13 on Communication

December 16:
Time for working on final paper
Continue Unit 13

January 13: presentations based on paper topic

Final Paper

Final paper and presentation

Final Paper
Paper Topic: chosen by you, based on one of these areas that we studied in the textbook -
Strategy (chapter 3)
Outsourcing (chapter 7)
Recruitment (chapter 9)
Counterfeiting (chapter 10)
Communication (chapter 13)
Topic deadline: December 16
Format: Using the basic title, introduction, body, conclusion, reference list format, your introduction should include -
your topic stated clearly as a statement of what you wanted to find out
  * the reason you chose the topic
  * how you will discuss your topic in the rest of the paper (i.e., "I will begin by .......
Next, I will ........, and finally I will ....).
Reference list: **You must have at least one reference from an English source. Start your reference list on the next line after the last line of your paper. Do not start it on a new page. The reference list should follow the format I gave you before - nearly everyone did it poorly last time, so make sure to review and follow the guidelines I gave you. To repeat:

Books:
Author name. (publication year). Book title. City of book publication: Publisher name.
Magazine articles: Author name. (publication year). Article title. Journal name, volume, pp.#.
Websites:
Author name. (Date). Article title. HP title. Retrieved from: URL
If you use other types of sources, ask me how to reference them.
Mistakes in your reference list will lower your grade.

Length: 3-5 pages, 1.5 spaced + references
Number of references: it is up to you, but you should have at least two
Copying: If you copy from your sources, your grade will automatically be zero. When you want to refer to a source in your paper, do it like this:
According to ......,
The complete reference (following the above format) for the reference should be in the reference list.
Hand in your paper at my office by January 20 at 12 noon. You will lose 10% off your grade for each day you are late.

Check your paper for grammar and spelling mistakes. Papers with such mistakes will receive a lower grade.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Presentation:
Length: 10 minutes maximum, including Q&A
Format: See the presentation for January 13 page for details

HW for December 2

As I mentioned in class today (November 25), there are two things to do for next week.
1. p. 63 Practice 1 - It is only necessary to rewrite the 7 sentences using Type 1 conditional.
Type 1 conditional is constructed as follows:
Form

In a Type 1 conditional sentence, the tense in the 'if' clause is the simple present, and the tense in the main clause is the simple future. 

If clause (condition)	Main clause (result)
If + simple present	simple future
If this thing happens	that thing will happen.

As in all conditional sentences, the order of the clauses is not fixed. You may have to rearrange the pronouns and adjust punctuation when you change the order of the clauses, but the meaning is identical.

EXAMPLES

• If it rains, you will get wet.
• You will get wet if it rains.
• If Sally is late again I will be mad.
• I will be mad if Sally is late again.
• If you don't hurry, you will miss the bus.
• You will miss the bus if you don't hurry.

FUNCTION

The type 1 conditional refers to a possible condition and its probable result. These sentences are based on facts, and they are used to make statements about the real world, and about particular situations. We often use such sentences to give warnings. In type 1 conditional sentences, the time is the present or future and the situation is real.

EXAMPLES

• If I have time, I'll finish that letter.
• What will you do if you miss the plane?
• Nobody will notice if you make a mistake.
• If you drop that glass, it will break.
• If you don't drop the gun, I'll shoot!
• If you don't leave, I'll call the police.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2. Do some research on outsourcing/offshoring. Please research the topic you are assigned. Make good notes so you can present your information to the class next week. It is not necessary to prepare a powerpoint, but make sure you are well prepared so you can give your classmates some useful information.

1. Outsourcing advantages  - Ryosuke, Mariko    
2.  Outsourcing disadvantages - Keiichi
3. Kinds of office work that can be outsourced - Misuzu, Jun
4. Risks of outsourcing - Isamu, Momoha
5. Keys to successful outsourcing - Sacha                                                                                          

Vocabulary and comprehension questions for Unit 7 The new global shift reading p. 60

Par. 1 "The handwriting is on the wall" - expression meaning something is very clear and that something significant is happening. In this article, the "handwriting" refers to corporate downsizing and job slashing.
Par. 4  "mining databases" - to mine, in this case, is to get information from the databases. In a real mine, you extract gems."To mine something" simply means getting something out of something - usually some kind of information.
Par. 5 - surplus - more than is needed
redeploy - to redirect
Par. 6 "to keep xxx in check" - to keep something under control - in this case, it is prices.
Par. 7 - backlash - strong negative reaction
Par. 8 - beneficiary -  someone who receives something/has an advantage over something.
implication - conclusion; result

Check the Unit 7 glossary on p. 150 for more definitions to help you understand the article and answer these questions. Also check online for information when you need it.
Questions
Paragraph 2
1. Why are a lot of jobs headed to India?
2. What are employees doing at Wipro?

Paragraph 3
3. What was the first phase of globalisation?
4. What was the next phase?

Paragraph 4
5. And what is the third phase that is the focus of this article?

Paragraph 5
6. What is offshore hiring?

Paragraph 8
7. What is the "global knowledge industry"?
8. Who are the "big benificaries" mentioned?